This Internet thing is just a fad...

Maybe someday people will put music and their home movies on the net.  Nah.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link.

Thoughts on Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

I am a very slow reader.  I got this book (HarperCollins, Ha) several weeks ago, but I haven't read much of it.  In the past, I would do whole book reviews on here, but in this case, I think I will chunk it out, and do reviews of sections of the book.  It is derived from an edge.org project.  They have about 150 2-4 page essays from prominent scientists and artists.  The book is an edited version of the essays on the edge.org site.  For example, Clay Shirky talks about the invisible college. 

Concerning the old publishing and mass media system:

The beneficiaries of the system in which making things public was a privileged activity--academics, politicians, reporters, doctors--will compain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake: The change they are protesting is already in the past.  The real action is elsewhere. [Preprint of the essay is here.]

I hear some things like this from my faculty.  I need them to wake up and see that the old publishing system is dying, and that they need to support new methods of publishing and peer-review. The Administrators need to figure out new ways to award tenure based on the different publishing systems. The architecture of access to scientific knowledge is just plain messed up.  We can't go back to the good ol' days.


Hopefully, I will be able to blog about many more sections of this book.

The Shanachie Tour came to Chicago

The members of the Shanachie Tour (Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap van de Geer) are "World Famous" for their travels and interviews. Here are some new ones. They interview some great librarians and friends of mine.

ALA Annual Conference 2009 Chicago from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

OCLC Blog Salon:Shenanigans with Shanachies from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Videos on the future of libraries

While I know about quite a number of websites and reports (see these blog posts from John Dupuis, this LISNews report, this PLoS article, this ARL report, this book, these ACRL reports, and the Darien Statements) that are about the future of libraries and other information services, I recently learned about some new videos that are about the future of libraries.

• Betsy Wilson's Crystal Ball: New Directions for Libraries (Crystal Ball Gazing: New Directions for Research Libraries Tuesday, October 16; 8:30-10:00; Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley)

• New Directions: Imperatives Defining the Future Relevance and Impact of the Academic Research Library -- by Jim Neal (James Neal is the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University in New York City, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of 25 libraries.)

• New Directions -- by Peter Brantley. (He is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. He has served as the Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF.)

• We can't forget about students... Take a look at a vision of students today -- by Michael Wesch (This summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.)

• The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age. This took place at Texas A&M University, February 11-13, 2009. A bunch of the videos and reports are relevant.

What is the future of academic publishing?

I have been reading A LOT lately about the demise of the newspaper business. Particularly interesting is Clay Shirky's take on the whole system -- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Thanks to 2009 M&S winner, Dorothea Salo, I found found history. This post has a good analysis that compares/contrasts the demise of the newspaper market with the academic publishing market. Tom Scheinfeldt said: "In our world, parallels to newspaper publishers can be made, for instance, with journal publishers or the purveyors of subscription research databases (indeed the three are often one and the same). I’m sure you can point to lots of others, and I’d be very happy to hear them in comments. But what interests me most in Shirky’s piece are his ideas about how the advent of the unthinkable divides a community of practitioners."Just what I have been thinking. The academic journal market is sinking like the Titanic. The established publishers do not want that cash cow ship to sink. The problem is that the cost of publishing truly has decreased, even though the big publishers say it costs $2,850 or $3,000 or somesuch figure to publish an article. The $3k is the cost with the existing broken journal system! They cannot image a future that does not have the "the brand of the journal which gives the imprimatur to the research article." To generalize a tad, older established researchers do indeed care about the name of the container of their articles, since that carries much of the weight for tenure purposes. They may ask -- "What is going to replace the newspaper industry/academic journal market? It can't go away because it is such a venerable institution." Therefore, it can't go away. But, as we have learned from Clay Shirky, newspapers are going away, and it may take some time for journalists to find another way to document the news and culture of the day. Journals and publishers (and societies) will start disappearing, and authors will find other channels to publish their thoughts, experimental results and ideas. Indeed, many physicists already have since 1991.

Many students (and some researchers) do not care about the name of the journal that houses the article. They care about the article itself. This viewpoint will continue to grow as they get older. More and more patrons will find articles through Google Scholar and other databases instead of browsing the current issues of Science, Nature, JACS or whatever.

Believe or not, my library is going through a cancellation discussion for the first time in 18 years. Our faculty and students have not had to worry about cancellations in quite some time. Thus, they have been shielded from the growing STM serials crisis. The faculty and the students are not the ones who pay the bill for the information. The library pays (well, the University actually) and the patrons are the ones who enjoy the benefits of the access to all of the subscriptions. This strange economic model has been well researched by Mark J. McCabe.

I wish I had time to read all of the 87+ books - and - reports that John Dupuis posted to his blog. I've already read a bunch, but there is so much great insight to be gleaned from all of these. (I wish I had more time to read...)

I imagine a future world where scholars post their work on websites/blogs -- it gets critiqued by a variety of scholars, and the articles get rated. The scholarly articles that get the highest ratings, citations and links get brought to the top of search results. As it stands now, articles do not HAVE to live within the imprimatur of a journal brand to have an impact. They can live on a website, in an IR, at a preprint server, etc. In the future, more and more and more scholarly articles will simply live on the net as stand-alone items without being housed in a journal. This is where the scholarly article market is headed.

My short review of the Age of Spiritual Machines

I came across this book (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) written in 1999 concerning the future of computing. Dr. Kurzweil has an interesting take on the future of computing and the human race. He sees things in a very positive light, and he is a very strong "strong AI" proponent. He had many specific predictions about the future of computing in 10 year increments. There are predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099. Since it is now 2009, I thought I would look at his predictions for 2009 to see how accurate they are. The synopsis of his predictions come from pages 277-278, but chapter nine (pages 189-201) covers the year 2009 in more detail.

"A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second." This would be 1,000 Gigahertz computer. In looking at some Dell and Gateway desktop models that cost around $1,000, I see that they have processors such as a Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor up to 3.33GHz or an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8200 at 2.33GHz. This isn't exactly 1,000 GHz, but with the dual and quad processors, they may be effectively operating at much greater than a 3.33 or a 2.33 GHz single Intel processor. Processing power isn't as important as it used to be. Memory is also very important, and that is not addressed at all in his book. Also, the speed of the computer can depend on the operating system that is used.

"Personal Computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewelry up to the size of a thin book." He kind of called this one, but wearable computers are not exactly in fashion these days, unless you consider an iPhone a wearable computer.

"Cables are disappearing. Communications between components use short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web." Plenty of cables are still around, but WIFI and G3 is taking care of the Web access.

"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces." Ummmmmmmmmmm, no.

"Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often, the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face." Well, we do make purchases and reservations online, but it is not with an animated virtual presence.

"Although traditional classroom organization is still common, intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning." We are not even close to being there. I think Dr. Kurzweil doesn't understand the political and social inertia that is in the public education system and in the college educational system. High quality educational software is pretty difficult to devise.

"Translating telephones (speech-to-speech language translation) are commonly used for many language pairs." Another no.

"Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the 20th century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply effective by the accelerating improvement in the price performance of computing." Well, no. However, how could he possibly have predicted the 9/11 bombings. The Tech bubble bursting in the early 2000's, and the economic and housing market collapse of the fall of 2008. We are in a stage of abundant over consumption, and humans need to learn not to consume so much and to save more.

"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians." Again no. But, I do find the word 'cybernetic' interesting. Haven't used that word in some time.

"Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease have greatly reduced the mortality from these diseases." I wish. As humans have gotten heavier, our heart problems have gotten worse. The war on cancer is still being waged.

"The neo-Luddite movement is growing." Another no. I see more and more people sharing their thoughts, ideas, images and videos using Web2.0 technology. We are seeing solutions to our problems being solved with crowd-sourced open-access software platforms.

Some other good reviews are at:

Fogel, David B., A true visionary's truly fantastic vision. IEEE Spectrum, (July 1999), Vol. 36 Issue 7, p9-10.

Casti, John L., Exit Homo sapiens, stage left. Nature (2/25/1999), Vol. 397 Issue 6721, p663-664.

Proudfoot, Diane, How Human Can They Get? Science (04/30/1999), Vol. 284 Issue 5415, p745.